Journal of Network and Computer Applications

The Journal of Network and Computer Applications welcomes research contributions, surveys and notes in all areas relating to computer networks and applications thereof. The following list of sample-topics is by no means to be understood as restricting contributions to the topics mentioned:
new design techniques, interesting or novel applications, components or standards
computer networks with tools such as WWW
emerging standards for internet protocols
Wireless networks
Mobile Computing
emerging computing models such as cloud computing, grid computing
emerging network protocols such as sensor networks, delay tolerant networks, Internet of things
applications of networked systems for remote collaboration and telemedicine
applications of an educational, transactional and cooperational nature
applications of security in computer and networks

Special Issue on 5G Radios and NetworksSubmission Date: 2017-10-15In Sep. 2015, International Telecommunication Unit Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) has identified three categories of upcoming wireless features for the fifth generation (5G) radios and networks. In the meantime, ITU-R has also identified the radio transmission requirements of 5G (also known as International Mobile Telecommunications 2020, IMT-2020). To this end, 3GPP and IEEE consequently launched the standardization activity to frame 5G radios and networks. To satisfy these unprecedented radio transmission requirements, a number of innovative technologies will be adopted. The objective of this special issue is consequently to bring together state-of-the-art innovations, research activities, and the corresponding standardization impacts of 5G, so as to understand the inspirations, requirements, and the promising technical options to boost the development of 5G radios and networks.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- New waveforms, NOMA, multi-user superposition transmission (MUST), beamforming based radio access, radio resource and interference management for eMBB, URLLC and mMTC
- IEEE 802.11ax, 802.11ad, 802.11ay, 802.11ah and next generation WiFi technologies
- Ultra-dense network, multiple TRPs, cloud radio access network, massive MIMO, sidelink, mobile backhaul, unlicensed transmissions
- SDN, NFV, network slicing, open architecture for next generation core
- Simulation platform, prototypes and field-try, standardizations of 5G radios and networks
- Impacts of innovative applications supported by 5G radios and networks

Special Issue on Scalable Network Infrastructures and Applications for IoT in Smart CitiesSubmission Date: 2017-12-15The wide adoption of networked, pervasive, and mobile computing systems gave rise to the term of “smart cities,” which nowadays must also imply the ability of sustainable city growth. The Internet-of-Things is a central enabler in this perspective, facilitated by the widespread availability of commodity low-power sensors, partially autonomous actuators and robots, smartphones, tablets, and their wireless connectivity solutions. These elements, combined with i) proper scalable network infrastructures, ii) dynamically extensible software platforms capable of integrating sensors/actuators discovered at runtime, and iii) novel applications capable of stimulating the scalable participation of high numbers of entities widespread in the city, may be utilized to address the challenges of sustainable urban environments.
For example, the extreme scalability constraints envisioned for smart city networking infrastructures, smart city distributed support platforms, and smart city applications on top, are generating challenging technical demands for ultra-low latency, massive connectivity, and high reliability, thus paving the way to the need and widespread adoption of mobile edge computing approaches. Mobile edge computing (or fog computing), in fact, is demonstrating to be able to optimize network infrastructure usage in such challenging scenarios, by dynamically exploiting virtualized resources (allocated network resources, processing functions, and storage space) at computing edges and reducing the need for interworking and continuous connectivity with the global cloud (geographically remote datacenters).
It starts to be recognized that mobile edge computing can play a central and relevant role for the scalability of network infrastructures and applications for IoT in smart cities in the near future. However, the successful employment of mobile edge computing solutions in the field still requires tackling many new and open technical issues. Only to mention some examples, in order to efficiently exploit computation and storage resources at mobile edge nodes, there is the need for joint optimization of dynamic placement of computation/storage resource (also considering stateful/stateless live migration opportunities) and cell-association with radio resource allocation. Such joint optimization should be adaptive according to time-varying environments, e.g., varying wireless channel states and dynamic computation/storage resource utilizations, in their turn depending on users’ mobility, often statistically predictable in terms of patterns that are inferred based on “big monitoring data” originated by the smart city .
In this special issue, articles regarding the use of technologies, methodologies, and applications for scalable smart cities based on the integration of IoT devices and mobile edge computing approaches are invited. Authors are encouraged to submit articles that describe original research and present results that advance the state-of-the-art in the field,
by fueling more related efforts in the future, as well as survey/tutorial manuscripts.
Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited, to the following ones:
- Scalable network infrastructures for smart cities
- IoT architectures, protocols, and algorithms in smart cities
- Enabling technologies for IoT-cloud integration in smart cities
- Ubiquitous sensing and actuation in smart cities, under latency and scalability constraints
- Edge-to-cloud protocols and network architectures for mobile edge computing
- QoE and QoS provisioning in scalable smart city applications
- Crowdsensing and crowdsourcing for scalable IoT in smart cities
- Virtualization and network slicing for mobile edge computing
- Location and sizing of computation and storage elements for mobile edge computing
- 5G/LTE/WiFi-enabled mobile edge computing for scalable IoT
- Real-time online stream processing of IoT datasources for smart cities
- Mobile edge computing for distributed big data analytics
- Smart cities data storage, ownership, and access methods
- Scalable smart city applications for sustainable eco-cities (for environmentally friendly transportation, waste management, eco-friendly buildings, etc.)
- Intelligent transportation systems and vehicular networks
- Smart sharing systems and sharing economy
- Reliability, security, safety, privacy, and trust issues